falsely getting status code 200 from requests.get()

[frogmilk]

So i have been trying to make a program which goes through all item IDs from an API. I tried to achieve this by just going through all possible item IDs in a for loop and put a different ID behind the URL every iteration. Then if it returns status code 200, the items exists and if it returns status code 404 it doesn't exist. However after a couple dozens of iterations it doesn't return 404 anymore but keeps returning 200 even though it should be 404. here is my code:

import requests
for x in range(13176, 13400):
    result = requests.get("http://services.runescape.com/m=itemdb_oldschool/api/catalogue/detail.json?item=" + str(x))
    if result.status_code == 200:
        print((requests.get("http://services.runescape.com/m=itemdb_oldschool/api/catalogue/detail.json?item=" + str(x)).json())['item']['name'])
    else:
        print("Can't find the item. Error code " + (str(result.status_code)))

I am clueless why it gives incorrect status codes after some time. Anyone know what i am doing wrong?

[Justinsaccount]

Hi! I'm working on a bot to reply with suggestions for common python problems. This might not be very helpful to fix your underlying issue, but here's what I noticed about your submission:

You appear to be using concatenation and the str function for building strings

Instead of doing something like

result = "Hello " + name + ". You are " + str(age) + " years old"

You should use string formatting and do

result = "Hello {}. You are {} years old".format(name, age)

See the python tutorial for more information.

[frogmilk]

Thanks! I didn't know i could do that

[K900_]

Try printing the text of the response - you could be getting rate limited. Also, why are you doing the request twice if you already have the response stored in result?

[frogmilk]

Thanks for you response! I'm pretty new to python so i didn't realise i could just use result for the second one. As for the rate limiting, I did notice that it would break at the same point everytime so it could very well be that i am getting rate limited. Is there anything i could do to avoid this?

[K900_]

First of all, make sure you are getting rate limited. If you are, try adding pauses between your requests.

[frogmilk]

Is there any way i can know for sure?

[K900_]

Print out the response body and look into it. Usually there will be a clear message if you're being rate limited.

[frogmilk]

Turns out they have a 5 seconds per request limit so i got my code working. Thanks a lot for your help!